Speak Your Mind: This Produce is Poppin’!

Recently, I started a new job. To someone as prone to anxiety as I am, this was a stressful experience. Meeting new people, hoping people like you…it’s a freaking nightmare! And it’s not helped by the fact that I seem to speak my own language. More than once I’ve been on the receiving end of blank looks when I say things like “Intertubz” and “what the what.”

This is pretty much my life when I meet new people, but my brother has the opposite problem. You see, he’s a normal human being who doesn’t say weird stuff. However, when he worked at a grocery store, his boss said some silly stuff. For example, he provided me with the phrase I use when I really like something: “This produce is poppin’!” (What the what? How do you even respond to that?)

Do you ever get caught saying something that seems normal to you, but is like a foreign language to everyone else? How do you handle it? Do you have any esoteric phrases that I can drop into casual office conversation?

7 Comments

Haha, I feel this way whenever my boyfriend and I are around other people and we’re talking about World of Warcraft. I remember before I started playing listening to him talk about it with his friends, getting three words into a sentence and…whaaaa?

I’m going to be gearing my toon Kahra today by running BC instances as a DPS.

Simple sentence, no context. Also true.

I’ve said uber a lot (I really sincerely hope you know what it’s supposed to mean) and gotten blank stares. I thought uber was common!

“Do you ever get caught saying something that seems normal to you, but is like a foreign language to everyone else?”

Like, ALL THE TIME in the last few weeks. But there is obviously a reason for that. 😛 Most of it is really mundane, though, and half the time I think they can’t understand my accent (that happens too), so I talk loudly and start spelling it out and they’re still like ‘I don’t understand what that is’.

I went camping on the weekend and I kept slipping up and going on about tramping and torches instead of hiking and flashlights.

To be fair, Lauren, I believe those who were raised south of the equator speak their native language backwards, as heard by normal people who live north of the equator. I’m pretty sure I read that on the Internet in my brain, so it’s probably true.

Saying “y’all” and “soda” north of the Mason-Dixon. What can I say? “Y’all” fills a need in the English language (second person plural) more elegantly than “yous” or “you guys”, and I do not like the sound of “pop”. There’s also more generally outdated phrases I’m liable to say like “Heavens to Betsy!” or “slower than molasses in January”. You hear it enough and it comes out.

Those are what comes naturally, but I’m always searching for wildly outdated or bizarre phrases to incorporate.

Definitely yes. I will at a moment of breakthrough in the office throw my right hand into the air and yell “Eiffel Tower”! I get blank stares. If only my daughter was around she would know I was indicating a “high 5” moment. Really “It’s not rocket science” I would think, but then again they just don’t know our wacky ways 🙂

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